The Cool School (21 page)

All I knew two days later when Jack left for Florida was that when I got off the bus in San Francisco at the end of the summer, I’d find him waiting for me in the Greyhound terminal, ready to carry my suitcase through the streets of North Beach until he found me a beautiful cheap room in some hotel where Allen Ginsberg had once lived, where we’d make love on the new bed. And he’d take me out to all the jazz joints that very night, and introduce me to everyone—Neal Cassady, in particular, was going to be crazy about me, because I’d remind him right away of his first wife, a sixteen-year-old blonde runaway named Luanne.

I
NTERESTINGLY
enough, the only woman Jack Kerouac ever actually took with him on the road wasn’t me or Edie Parker or Carolyn Cassady or any of the
darkfellaheen
beauties of his longings, but Gabrielle L’Evesque Kerouac, age sixty-two, with her bun of iron-grey hair and her round spectacles and her rosary beads in her old black purse.

As Jack laments the dreariness of bus stations, the awful unendingness of transcontinental highways, the nights of upright, jolted sleep to which he’s subjecting his mother, Memere cheerfully looks out the window at the Texas plains, the Rio Grande Valley, the Mojave Desert, keeping the two of them going with the aspirins she’s sensibly brought with her, alternated with Cokes. She buys souvenirs and, in a restaurant where she orders oysters, flirts with an old man and writes her address for him on a menu. Memere’s thrilled by the small adventure of an overnight stop in a run-down hotel that humiliates
Jack by its cheapness. It’s all luxury and gaiety, not hardship. With her boy Jackie beside her, she’s seeing the world at last. What had she known but work and poverty and Sunday masses? As a child of fourteen she’d gone into the shoe factories, married at seventeen, had three babies—a lifetime of sewing and mending, soapsuds and thrift. In thrift, she’d surpassed even my mother, saving the last inches of thread on a spool, half a potato, a quarter of an onion, a packet of needles from 1910. The boxes Jack packed for Memere to bring to California were full of what the affluent would consider mere debris. Perhaps to her those few days on the Greyhound bus seemed the bridal journey she’d never had.

But no house awaited Memere and Jack after all. Only a three-room apartment without enough furniture and they had to watch every penny at the supermarket. Memere hated Berkeley, hated the hills and the morning fog that kept the clothes from drying on the line, hated the crazy strangers that kept dropping in to lure Jack away from her, hated the sound of his typewriter behind his shut door. She missed her daughter and her neighbors and the beautiful Orlando sunshine. Why couldn’t Jackie just live with her in some nice place there? What was the good of all this foolish moving around? she asked her son.

“A
NXIOUSLY
AWAITING
your coming out here now,” Jack wrote me in his letter of June 11, adding that not only he but Neal was pleading with me to hurry up and to bring Elise and Sheila with me, so that we’d all be ready for a great new season. Berkeley was quiet and flowery; San Francisco wilder than before. The papers every day were full of news and editorials about
Howl,
which had been banned for obscenity and removed from bookstores by the local police.

The main North Beach hangout, The Place, had clippings about
Howl
on the bulletin board as well as paintings by local artists and phone messages and letters that the bartender held for his customers. “You will love this mad joint,” Jack wrote. “Nothing like it in New York.” One night he’d gotten into a ridiculous fight there, which he described with relish. A small bespectacled man had been hitting
his wife. When Jack intervened, he took a swing at him. Holding his assailant by the arms, Jack had simply “dumped him sitting” to the floor.

But the letter ended bewilderingly and sadly: “It’s the end of the land, babe, it gives you that lonely feeling—I
KNOW
that I’ll eventually return to NY to live. Mad Jack.”

I
WANTED
to get my bus ticket the minute I read that letter, but I was scared to arrive there penniless. Somehow I had to save two hundred dollars. I gave up my apartment and moved in for the time being with my friend Connie who had worked for Robert Giroux. The change was too much for Ti Gris, who found a way to slide open a window screen and make his getaway from my life at long last. “Well I guess Ti Gris’s on his way to China, where he will become an immortal and ride away on a dragon,” Jack wrote.

Meanwhile I’d talked Elise into going to California with me. Hadn’t we always planned to go adventuring together? She had nothing to lose but her awful typing job. From Tangier, Allen had gone on to Paris with Peter and wouldn’t be back till next spring. It was dangerous to wait for him anyway. In Berkeley, Elise could go to graduate school—it would be easy for her to do that, according to Jack. Everything was easy in California, land of blue skies and leafy streets and a million new interesting scenes and people.

“I hope, when you get here,” Jack worried, “you’ll allow me to be a little bugged in general, I just can’t imagine what to do or think anymore. Incidentally, tho, I’d like to draw you or paint you, at leisure . . .”

J
UST
WHEN
I was so eager to abandon New York, it seemed to turn before my eyes into a kind of Paris. The new cultural wave that had crested in San Francisco was rolling full force into Manhattan, bringing with it all kinds of newcomers—poets, painters, photographers, jazz musicians, dancers—genuine artists and hordes of would-be’s, some submerging almost instantly, others quickly bobbing to the surface and remaining visible. Young and broke, they converged upon
the easternmost edges of the Village, peeling off into the nondescript district of warehouses and factory lofts, and Fourth Avenue with its used bookstores, and the broken-wine-bottle streets of the Bowery. An area with an industrial rawness about it, proletarian, unpretty—quite illegal to live in, but landlords were prepared to look the other way. An outlaw zone that silently absorbed people who’d sneak their incriminating domestic garbage out in the dead of night or hide a bed behind a rack of paintings, always listening for the knock of the housing inspector.

An older group of painters had survived here since the late 1940s. In lofts deserted by the garment industry, where sewing-machine needles could still be found in the crevices of floorboards, they’d dispensed with the confinements of the easel. Possessing space if little else, they’d tacked their canvases across larger and larger stretches of crumbling plaster, or nailed them to the floor. They threw away palettes and used the metal tops of discarded kitchen tables. Paint would rain down on the sized white surfaces—house paint, if there was no money for oils—colors running in rivulets, merging, splashing, coagulating richly in glistening thickness, bearing witness to the gesture of the painter’s arm in a split second of time, like the record of a mad, solitary dance. Or like music, some said, like bop, like a riff by Charlie Parker, incorrigible junky and genius, annihilated by excess in 1955, posthumous hero of the coming moment. Or like Jack’s “spontaneous prose,” another dance in the flow of time. For the final issue of
Black Mountain Review,
he’d jotted down his own manifesto, which many of the New York painters soon would read: “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words
blowing
(as per jazz musician) on subject of image.”

Substitute
painting, color, stroke,
and it was close in spirit to the way the painters defined themselves in their heated discussions at “The Club,” a loft on Eighth Street where they met regularly, or over beers at the Cedar Bar, continuing on into dawn over coffee at Riker’s. Blearily they’d stagger back to their studios, switching on the light to
stare at the new canvas up on the wall, matching it to the words still spinning in the brain, feeling exhausted or depressed or dangerously exalted—with the rent due, after all, and not enough money for the tube of cadmium red, and no gallery another goddam year.

But Jackson Pollock had broken the ice, they said, broken it for all of them, and then died—in classic American style—in his Oldsmobile, in his new affluence and fame that seemed to mean so little to him by the time he got it that he veered off the road into a tree by the side of Montauk Highway on his way to a party with his teen-age mistress and her girlfriend. Suicide by alcohol, this accident they all still talked about obsessively even a year later. Endless Jackson stories they told, and they journeyed out to Amagansett to the grave marked by a granite boulder that had been outside Pollock’s house, with his signature on it in bronze as if he’d signed his death—the name of the artist at the very end completing the painting.

Legend adheres to artists whose deaths seem the corollaries of their works. There’s a perversely compelling satisfaction for the public in such perfect correspondences—like the satisfaction the artist feels upon completing an image. It was fitting that Jackson Pollock, whose paintings were explosions of furious vitality, dizzying webs of paint squeezed raw from the tube, who ground cigarette butts into his canvases with seeming brutal disrespect for the refinements of Art, would smash through a windshield at eighty miles an hour. Thirteen years later, Kerouac’s quiet death in St. Petersburg would be viewed as improper, slightly embarrassing—at best, supremely ironic. Better to have died like Pollock or James Dean, or like Neal Cassady had—of exposure on the railroad tracks.

Artists are nourished by each other more than by fame or by the public, I’ve always thought. To give one’s work to the world is an experience of peculiar emptiness. The work goes away from the artist into a void, like a message stuck into a bottle and flung into the sea. Criticism is crushing and humiliating. Pollock was hailed as a genius by the time he died, but could he have forgotten the widely repeated witticism that his paintings could have been done by a chimpanzee?
As for praise, somehow it falls short, empty superlatives. The true artist knows the pitfalls of vanity. Dangerous to let go of one’s anxiety. But did you
understand?
must always be the question. To like and admire is not enough: did you
understand?
And will you understand the next thing I do—the wet canvas in my studio, the page I left in my typewriter? Unreasonably, the artist would like to know this, too. Praise has to do with the past, the finished thing; the unfinished is the artist’s preoccupation.

Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it,
once
) arriving at pivot, where what was dim formed “beginning” becomes sharp-necessitating “ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following law of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle—Night is The End.

—Jack Kerouac

It’s with a fire that the summer of 1957 comes in, in my memory, a giant conflagration on Eighth Street and Broadway. I remember the night sky filling with smoke and flame and the fire engines clamoring, and that it was a Friday and, being at loose ends, I’d stayed downtown after work. Wanamaker’s Department Store was burning—the massive old landmark that had stood for so long like a boundary wall between the Village and the East Side. That Friday night it burned to the ground. The famous clock I’d walked under in January on my way to meet Jack melted like one of Salvador Dali’s watches.

What a strange night it was. The summer restlessness, the mobs watching the fire, the smell of ashes everywhere. On East Tenth Street a half-dozen galleries were opening that night for the first time, according to fliers pasted up around the Village. Owned and run by artists, they seemed to have come into being all at once in deserted storefronts. Gradually, the shabby block between Fourth Avenue and the Bowery had become a little country of painters. Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, men whose names had just become familiar to
me, lived on that street, as did many of the totally unknown artists whose works I was about to see in the small new galleries. For me Tenth Street had the charm of foreign territory—to enter it that fiery night was like finding Washington Square all over again.

Under the strange dusky orange glare, as passing sirens wailed, groups of people moved from storefront to storefront, talking intensely, laughing, congratulating each other, gulping wine from paper cups, calling out to friends: “Have you seen the stuff at the March yet?” . . . “Hey, I’ll meet you at the Camino!” . . . “Is Franz here? Anyone seen Franz?” To get into a gallery you’d first stand back from the narrow doorway to let a rush of others out, and, once inside, you’d be drawn into a slow circular progression from painting to painting and have to look at everything for a least a few moments, whether you liked what you saw or not. That seemed the unspoken rule—everyone’s work must be given attention.

I didn’t really know what to make of the paintings. What was I supposed to see? Where were the images? My college teachers had taught me always to look for images; but I found very few as recognizable as those in even the most difficult Picassos at the Museum of Modern Art. There was just all this paint. Sometimes you had the impression of tremendous energy or an emotion you couldn’t quite put into words; sometimes nothing came to you from the canvas at all. Was this how you decided which ones were good or bad?

But goodness and badness didn’t even seem important that night. It was the
occasion
that was important. What I’d wandered into wasn’t the beginning of something, but the coming into light of what had been stirring for years among all these artists who’d been known only to each other.

Major or minor, they all seemed possessed by the same impulse—to break out into forms that were unrestricted and new.

Minor Characters
, 1983